


I Don't Know Why I Put Up With You (Oh Wait, I Do)

by BeautifullyLovely



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: M/M, Post-The Raven King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 21:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6873796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifullyLovely/pseuds/BeautifullyLovely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Your boyfriend is kind of an asshole.”</p>
<p>“He can be.” Adam said. He thought Ronan would appreciate the honesty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Don't Know Why I Put Up With You (Oh Wait, I Do)

“Your boyfriend is kind of an asshole.”

“He can be.” Adam said. He thought Ronan would appreciate the honesty.

Cassidy’s eyebrows crunched together, all-awkward, confused motions. “Alright.” She said. The word was drawn out slow, thick like syrup.

Adam didn’t know what kind of impression he gave the people at his college. The trailer musk didn’t cling to him like it used to, but sometimes he still felt a fraud. Apparently, he wasn’t the type of person to date an asshole. Adam kind of smiled at that.

“I’m just saying.” Cassidy plopped down at the table. She knocked Adam’s notebook, making his pencil scratch an ugly line. “He pretty much made Chris piss his pants just from a look. The creepy ass raven didn’t help.”

“I remember.” Chris had looked absolutely petrified. Adam hadn’t bothered to apologize. He wasn’t Ronan’s keeper, didn’t have that patience or the time. And, well-- maybe Chris’ wide eyes and on-end hair had become an amusing image to replay during the lazy hours between classes. “The raven’s name is Chainsaw.”

“The raven’s name is Chainsaw, because that somehow makes things better.” Cassidy was kind of atrocious. She spoke her mind and didn’t really think about it beforehand. Adam liked her despite himself.

Cassidy’s long legs crossed. Her black combat boots shined; the skin of her thighs flushed. Adam thought of Blue, of Ronan. Adam thought of people far away and wished he could be both here and there.

“I just don’t think he deserves you, is all.” Cassidy said. Matter of fact, no argument.

Adam’s pencil snapped.

  
The thing was: Ronan wasn’t someone Adam imagined dating. Ever. At least, not before.

Then again, Adam looked at before, and he looked at now, and he was pretty clear on disliking before a hell of a lot.

There was really no reason to be angry at Cassidy. Ronan was kind of terrible, the way he always was with new people. There was a bit less gruff, a bit more sullen that outright cutting, but Adam’s peers here wouldn’t see that. They’d just see a guy they smiled at keep his arms crossed and his stance stiff: Back off, get away. The offence would naturally set in, after that.

Fair enough, honestly.

He just-- he didn’t know. Anger wasn’t it, really. Adam knew anger because Adam knew Ronan, and, because Adam knew Ronan, he knew the many ways anger could be something else entirely.

Adam wasn’t built for emotions. Adam was built with a brain that ran rapid-fire equations and was passable at languages; he had a body that could go where it needed to and could move things with complex twistings of hands. That was survival. That was Adam; the Adam of birth to eighteen.

Nineteen was a different story. Around the survival, living had somehow settled in, and Adam wasn’t totally sure of what to do with it.

So, he was angry, but he wasn’t angry at what Cassidy said.

Adam rubbed his cheek, sighed, and opened his textbook.

  
He woke up to the alarm, but he was only halfway there. Seeing his phone bright on the floor, a new message pinging in the corner, helped him all the way awake.

The unlocked phone brought with it a storm of images. Opal’s nose pressed in close, so that Adam could see up her nostril. A bowl of melty ice-cream with Opal’s syrupy mouth in a wide grin. About six pictures of the dream animals, from the deer to the lightning bugs. No pictures of Ronan, because of course.

There was, at the end, a sprawling sunset picture. It wasn’t like the postcards Adam used to keep glued in notebooks he would open in the darkness of the trailer, drawing his hands over their faraway glimpses of beaches and cities that he’d never be able to really touch.

This wasn’t perfected; this was somewhat off. The angle wasn’t right, the lighting was a little too vague. There was a longing in the picture, an ache calling from the trees and rising into the dripping colors of the sky. Runny but bold. Beautiful.

Adam went through the process of saving the picture onto his phone. He thought about setting it as a lock screen, but that felt a little too obvious.

Class was good. There were days he felt a fraud, but today was not one of them.

  
Being honest was one of the hardest things possible, it seemed like.

Not Ronan’s type of half-honesty: a closed mouth when there was something that needed to be said. The real, the really horrible, honesty. Over and done, not dragged out. The kind you ran straight at without care of being knocked over. Or, perhaps, ran at knowing, with utter clarity, that you would be struck down.

To start: Adam valued this honesty. This was an honest remark.

To continue: Adam sucked at participating in this honesty. This was an excruciatingly honest remark.

Adam kept himself to high standards, and to know that he failed at something burned. They all failed at it--Noah, Gansey, Ronan, Blue. They all kept painful secrets from each other when they should have been shared. Adam disliked them for their weakness, but he didn’t hate them.

He hated himself, though.

He hated knowing, with a certainty that had escaped him before, that part of him was happy Cassidy believed he deserved better. It felt like the shittiest kind of secret.

He wasn't sure where it came from, but it made his stomach twist. It made him sick. He didn't want to be this: this person always crawling to be ahead of even the people he loved.

To be given expressed permission that he could do better, like he needed it, or something. The confirmation from someone else that he could have someone else if he wanted them.

It was confusing. He seemed confused, all the time.

There was just-- this trip he would get, when the girl in Lit would flirt with him, and he would nudge back. It made him feel good and nauseous. He could have this. He could have this.

So, not a shitty secret. Just a dirty one.

Once, with guilty hands, he typed out: I think I contemplated something kind of terrible. Then hit send.

It took a day, but Ronan texted back. Chainsaw sat on a post, judging him. Or, no. He looked again.

Adam had no clue how Chainsaw managed a human expression, but he put it up to her being a dream creature. Ronan’s dream creature, which was a creature that relied upon unspoken speech as a necessity.

The tilt of her head, the gleam in her eye, the curve of her beak: Is this supposed to be shocking?

Adam stared at it. He stared at it a while.

With quick, punchy movements, he texted back: You’re an asshole.

He was starting to think he understood Ronan’s reluctance to use words. Sometimes, they just couldn't contain this overwhelming, impossible feeling. Adam was blindsided. No, Adam saw this coming from miles away.

His hand went to his mouth, the palm covering a smile. He felt known, in all his unfettered, terrible glory.

And, more than that: he felt OK with it.

  
“Going to see The Boyfriend?” Cassidy asked. Ronan was, officially, The Boyfriend now. This was not, as the capitalization implied, something to be proud of.

There was an eighty-five percent chance that Ronan would be proud of it anyway.

Adam slipped his phone--crappy, flip, but it could take pictures--into his back pocket. He tugged the suitcase closed.

“Yeah, going to see Ronan.”

He was excited to be going to Henrietta. He felt like a different person. He was a different person.

“Good luck with that.” Cassidy’s hatred reminded Adam of early era Ronan-Blue. It made him grin.

“Thanks.” He said.

  
Ronan Lynch was a dating liability.

Ronan Lynch would ruin any introductions he made to your friends and family, by virtue of being himself. Ronan Lynch, while impossibly dedicated to the things he cared about, would laze about on anything else. Ronan Lynch had money, if that was what you were looking for, but he also had a daughter who chewed on rocking chair legs. Ronan Lynch had a fantastical mind, but that mind held within it all sorts of soul-fearing monsters ready to eat you up.

Ronan Lynch was a dating liability. Adam Parrish didn't care.

  
Adam pulled up at The Barns in a silver BMW. The first thing Ronan did was cuss him out.

Then he yanked Adam to him, and they were gripping each other, holding each other where all the cracked open seams were.

Adam ran a thumb over the hooks of Ronan’s tattoo. Ronan shivered.

“Well, loser. Get inside.”

Adam went.

There was a place for his suitcase, a place for his shoes. There was a place for Adam, right here, a spot to slip into between Ronan and Opal and the ridiculous, magical everything that was The Barns.

Adam’s heart quieted. The nervous jumping of his stomach stilled.

He thought about deserving. He thought maybe neither he nor Ronan deserved much.

He thought about how, objectively, intellectually, that thought kind of sucked ass. Not that there was anything wrong with sucking or asses or the two put together.

Adam despaired of his mind, sometimes.

“Parrish, you're thinking too hard.”

“What, Lynch?”

Ronan was looking at him. Adam was looking back. This was no longer something noteworthy. “I know you're trying to fit a bunch of crap together in your mind, but some things are just things.”

Adam hated him, then disliked him, then liked him, then loved him. It was not so easy as all that. There was a lot more bleeding into one from the other than Adam really acknowledged, but the core, the truth of it, was plain. Ronan Lynch required the full spectrum.

Hell. What an asshole.

Adam wanted to hold on, and hold on, and hold on.

“You’re kind of terrible.” Adam said.

Ronan didn't love like it was hard. He just did, even when it was the hardest thing on earth and he was snapping his teeth all the way.

Adam wasn't built for that, but that was alright.   
He had conquered more impossible odds; there was, he was realizing, more than one way to care for somebody.

“Well, fuck you too, Parrish.”

They grinned.


End file.
